The Walker Art Building as Seen by the Images of Leon B. Strout

Photographer Leon B. Strout (1869-1937) was one thing of an everyday round Bowdoin’s campus for the higher a part of 4 many years. The College routinely employed him to snap senior portraits, seize athletic workforce pictures, and doc graduation and different main occasions. With his studio at 200 Maine Street only a quick stroll away, Strout seemingly discovered it straightforward sufficient to pop over to campus every time a photographic alternative advisable itself. Capitalizing on new developments in images the primary few years of the 20 th century, Strout was capable of print and promote actual photograph postcards of campus scenes in his store and on the school bookstore. Such memento pictures have been standard with college students and guests alike. When the native newspaper, The Brunswick Record, started printing photographic pictures in its pages within the Nineteen Twenties, Strout discovered one other income supply for promoting pictures of the College and its happenings.

Of the almost 6,000 pictures that make up the Leon B. Strout Collection on the Bowdoin College Library’s Department of Special Collections & Archives, almost 400 doc Bowdoin’s campus, buildings, and occasions, together with a lot of and from the Walker Art Building. Constructed between 1892 and 1894, the Walker Art Building was designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead and White, one of many nation’s most distinguished architects.

Even earlier than its completion, the Walker Art Building was spectacular, as evidenced by Strout’s {photograph} of its development. Taken whereas Strout was in his early 20s and comparatively new to images, his {photograph} (Figure 1: image 3709) paperwork the in depth scaffolding, elaborate wooden formwork, and large-scale crane required to finish the constructing and its signature poured concrete coffered dome. Strout’s picture, the one identified one of many constructing beneath development, additionally provides us a way of the bodily calls for and actual risks confronted by the constructing’s bricklayers and masons.